Roman Y. Shtykh

Capturing User Contexts: Dynamic Profiling for Information Seeking Tasks

Knowing each userpsilas information needs is important for information systems to better facilitate human information activities. This is especially important in the days of information overload we are experiencing today. However, knowing and correctly applying individual information needs is extremely difficult, often impossible. Yet knowing multiple contexts of user information behavior can give us some conception (or a hint) of conceivable information a user tries to obtain in a particular context. In this paper we focus on capturing such information contexts into dynamically changing profiles which are further used to facilitate the userpsilas information seeking activities.

Dynamically constructing user profiles with similarity-based online incremental clustering

User profiling is a widely used technique to analyse and store user interests and preferences to apply this knowledge to improve user experiences with information systems. In this research paper, we present an approach for dynamically constructing user profiles, particularly from uniform relevance feedback in information-seeking activities. We propose an inference method for user interests, which we call High-Similarity Sequence Data-Driven (H2S2D) clustering and discuss its peculiarities and show its superiority for the creation of high-quality concepts, which are the elementary constituents of user profiles. To reflect the volatility of user interests and emphasise the steadiness of persistent preferences, we adopt recency, frequency and persistency as the three main criteria for multi-layered dynamic profile construction and update.

Integrating Search and Sharing: User-Centric Collaborative Information Seeking

User-centeredness has become an essential feature of information systems directly interacting with a user. In this paper we emphasize the importance of a user as an active content creator and contributor, community, and their synergy to achieve better user-centeredness in personalized Web search services. For this, we realize individual-community collaborative scheme integrating information search and sharing, and thus benefiting from both individual and community activities. Here we show the details of the scheme, including expertise-based information co-evaluation and collaborative search.

A Context-Aware Framework for Flowable Services

The paper first introduces the concept of flowable service, the basic idea of which is to organize circumjacent services in such a way so that they are perceived by an individual as those naturally embedded in his/her surrounding environment. It is achieved by seamless integration and provision of diverse services in an intuitive “flowable” way. For this, the mechanism responsible for service discovery, composition and provision has to have a good understanding of a user it serves to. We design a framework with a special focus on context-awareness to find and integrate the circumjacent services thought to be needed by each individual at his/her current situation, and thus create an ambient service environment tailored to his/her particular needs and characteristics. Here introduce the framework, its components and process abstraction, and outline some major issues we have to face when implementing our approach.

Peer‐to‐peer solution to support group collaboration and information sharing

In this study, we propose and develop an opensource groupware system called NetIsle. NetIsle is a general purpose groupware system for uniform open groups that integrate a number of tools for online collaboration to ensure fast information exchange and sharing, increase the productivity of working groups, and reduce maintenance and administration costs. The main technologies used for the construction of the system are peer‐to‐peer (P2P) and push, which are best fitted to those principles and beliefs we build our system upon.

Slide-film interface: overcoming small screen limitations in mobile web search

It is well known that alongside with search engine performance improvements and functionality enhancements one of the determinant factors of user acceptance of any search service is the interface. This factor is particularly important for mobile Web search mostly due to small screen limitations of handheld devices. In this paper we propose scrolless mobile Web search interface to decrease search efforts that are multiplied due to these limitations, and discuss its potential advantages and drawbacks over conventional one.

A Web Recommender System Based on Dynamic Sampling of User Information Access Behaviors

Abstract — In this study, we propose a Gradual Adaption Model for a Web recommender system. This model is used to track users’ focus of interests and its transition by analyzing their information access behaviors, and recommend appropriate information. A set of concept classes are extracted from Wikipedia. The pages accessed by users are classified by the concept classes, and grouped into three terms of short, medium and long periods, and two categories of remarkable and exceptional for each concept class, which are used to describe users’ focus of interests, and to establish reuse probability of each concept class in each term for each user by Full Bayesian Estimation as well. According to the reuse probability and period, the information that a user is likely to be interested in is recommended. In this paper, we propose a new approach by which short and medium periods are determined based on dynamic sampling of user information access behaviors. We further present experimental simulation results, and show the validity and effectiveness of the proposed system.

Improving Mobile Web Search Experience with Slide-Film Interface

With slide-film interface discussed in this paper we propose a new mobile Web search experience. The interface abolishes fatigue-inducing scrolling while preserving ¿quality¿ summaries of Web search results to improve the efficacy and efficiency of mobile Web search. The evaluation of the approach shows that the proposed interface is superior to the conventional mobile search method in a number of aspects like easy navigation and good viewability of search results and can be its good alternative.

Gradual Adaption Model for Estimation of User Information Access Behavior

In this study, we propose a gradual adaption model for estimation of user information access behavior. A variety of userspsila information access data are collected by unit of a day for each user, and analyzed in terms of short, medium, long periods, and by remarkable and exceptional categories. The proposed model is then established by analyzing the pre-processed data based on Full Bayesian Estimation. We further present experimental simulation results, and show the operability and effectiveness of our proposed model.

Design of Bookmark-Based Information Space to Support Exploration and Rediscovery

Search is not the only activity in information space users are engaged in. Most of time users rediscover things they used to find in the past, and often they just browse without any specific purpose discovering information space around them or with a particular purpose, such as learning miscellaneous information. We propose an approach for designing exploratory information space that makes use of human-centered power of bookmarking for information selection. The information space is built as a result of a search for something a user intends to discover, and serves as a place for rediscoveries of personal findings, socialization and exploration inside discovery chains of other participants of the proposed prototype system. The most important elements of the proposed information space, main elements of the prototype system to be implemented and used to explore the space, and use scenarios are discussed here.